Letter from Handan

In traditional Chinese architecture, a small wall stands a few feet in front of the entrance to a home. According to the principles of feng shui, this wall shields the occupants from malign energy forces. But in the city of Handan such walls have acquired another significance: as protection against acrid smoke billowing from the city’s factories. One summer evening in Sihoupo, a western suburb of Handan with three hundred residents, the glowing yellow flames of a coking plant erupted into the sky. Clouds swirled up around the factory, saturating the air with the smell of rotten eggs. Coking concentrates soft bituminous coal into hard briquettes that are used to smelt iron into steel, but it also produces carcinogenic emissions. “We can’t open our windows at night,” Hu Xuhui, a man in his late sixties who lives across from the factory, told me. “The days are bad, but the nights are worse.”